Read these top ten scientific theories and extract cause and effect or components of

research such as:

A question of interest (research question)
A claim (contribution)
Evidence
Argument (links evidence to claim)
Or simply critically review these theories to define problems
URL link: http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-famous-scientific-theories-that-turned-out-
to-be-wrong.php (See theories number: 9, 7, 5 and 2)
Top 10 Most Famous Scientific Theories (That Turned out to be Wrong)
POSTED BY EVAN ANDREWS ON MARCH 12, 2010 IN EDUCATION, SCIENCE
One of the best aspects of science has always been its readiness to admit when it got
something wrong. Theories are constantly being refigured, and new research frequently
renders old ideas outdated or incomplete. But this hasnt stopped some discoveries from
being hailed as important, game-changing accomplishments a bit prematurely. Even in a field
as rigorous and detail-oriented as science, theories get busted, mistakes are made, and
hoaxes are perpetrated. The following are ten of the most groundbreaking of these scientific
discoveries that turned out to be resting on some questionable data. It is worth noting that
most of these concepts are not necessarily wrong in the traditional sense; rather, they have
been replaced by other theories that are more complete and reliable.
10. The Discovery of Vulcan: Vulcan was a planet that nineteenth century scientists believed
to exist somewhere between Mercury and the Sun. The mathematician Urbain
Jean Joseph Le Verrier first proposed its existence after he and many other
scientists were unable to explain certain peculiarities about Mercurys orbit.
Scientists like Le Verrier argued that this had to be caused by some object, like
a small planet or moon, acting as a gravitational force. La Verrier called his
hypothetical planet Vulcan, after the Roman god of fire. Soon, amateur astronomers around
Europe, eager to be a part of a scientific discovery, contacted Le Verrier and claimed to have
witnessed the mysterious planet making its transit around the Sun. For years afterward,
Vulcan sightings continued to pour in from around the globe, and when La Verrier died in
1877, he was still regarded as having discovered a new planet in the solar system. How it was
proven wrong: Without La Verrier acting as a cheerleader for Vulcans existence, it suddenly
began to be doubted by many notable astronomers. The search was effectively abandoned in
1915, after Einsteins theory of general relativity helped to explain once and for all why
Mercury orbited the Sun in such a strange fashion. But amateur stargazers continued the
search, and as recently as 1970 there have been people who have claimed to see a strange
object orbiting the sun beyond Mercury. Amusingly, the entire would-be discoverys greatest
legacy today is that it inspired the name of the home planet of the character Spock from Star
Trek.
9. Spontaneous Generation: Although it might seem a bit ludicrous today, for thousands of
years it was believed that life regularly arose from the elements without first
being formed through a seed, egg, or other traditional means of reproduction.
The main purveyor of the theory was Aristotle, who based his studies on the
ideas of thinkers like Anaximander, Hippolytus, and Anaxagoras, all of whom
stressed the ways in which life could spontaneously come into being from
inanimate matter like slime, mud, and earth when exposed to sunlight.
Aristotle based his own ideas on the observation of the ways maggots would seemingly
generate out of dead animal carcass, or barnacles would form on the hull of a boat. This
theory that life could literally spring from nothing managed to persist for hundreds of years
after Aristotle, and was even being proposed by some scientists as recently as the 1700s. How
it was Proven Wrong: It was only with the adoption of the scientific method that many of the
classical theories like spontaneous generation began to be tested. Once they were, they
quickly crumbled. For example, famed scientist Louis Pasteur showed that maggots would not
appear on meat kept in a sealed container, and the invention of the microscope helped to
show that these same insects were formed not by spontaneous generation but by airborne
microorganisms.

8. The Expanding Earth: Our modern understanding of the interior and behaviors of the Earth
is strongly based around plate tectonics and the concept of subduction. But
before this idea was widely accepted in the late 20th century, a good number of
scientists subscribed to the much more fantastical theory that the Earth was
forever increasing in volume. The expanding Earth hypothesis stated that
phenomena like underwater mountain ranges and continental drift could be explained by the
fact that the planet was gradually growing larger. As the globes size grew, proponents
argued, the distances between continents would increase, as would the Earths crust, which
would have explained the creation of new mountains. The theory has a long and storied past,
beginning with Darwin, who briefly tinkered with it before casting it aside, and Nikola Tesla,
who compared the process to that of the expansion of a dying star. How it was Proven Wrong:
The expanding Earth hypothesis has never been proven wrong exactly, but it has been widely
replaced with the much more sophisticated theory of plate tectonics. While the expanding
Earth theory holds that all land masses were once connected, and that oceans and mountains
were only created as a result of the planets growing volume, plate tectonics explains the
same phenomena by way of plates in the lithosphere that move and converge beneath the
Earths surface.

7. Phlogiston Theory: First expressed by Johan Joachim Becher in 1667, phlogiston theory is
the idea that all combustible objectsthat is, anything that can catch fire
contain a special element called phlogiston that is released during burning,
and which makes the whole process possible. In its traditional form,
phlogiston was said to be without color, taste, or odor, and was only made
visible when a flammable object, like a tree or a pile of leaves, caught fire.
Once it was burned and all its phlogiston released, the object was said to once again exist in
its true form, known as a calx. Beyond basic combustion, the theory also sought to explain
chemical processes like the rusting of metals, and was even used as a means of understanding
breathing, as pure oxygen was described as dephlogistated air. How it was Proven Wrong:
The more experiments that were performed using the phlogiston model, the more dubious it
became as a theory. One of the most significant was that when certain metals were burned,
they actually gained weight instead of losing it, as they should have if phlogiston were being
released. The idea eventually fell out of favor, and has since been replaced by more
sophisticated theories, like oxidation.

6. The Martian Canals: The Martian canals were a network of gullies and
ravines that 19th century scientist mistakenly believed to exist on the red
planet. The canals were first discovered in 1877 by Italian astronomer
Giovanni Schiaparelli. After other stargazers corroborated his claim, the
canals became something of a phenomenon. Scientists drew detailed maps
tracing their paths, and soon wild speculation began on their possible
origins and use. Perhaps the most absurd theory came from Percival Lowell, a mathematician
and astronomer who jumped to the bizarre conclusion that the canals were a sophisticated
irrigation system developed by an unknown intelligent species. Lowells hypothesis was
widely discredited by other scientists, but it was also popularly accepted, and the idea
managed to survive in some circles well into the 20th century. How it was Proven Wrong:
Quite unspectacularly, the Martian canals were only proven to be a myth with the advent of
greater telescopes and imaging technology. It turned out that what looked like canals was in
fact an optical illusion caused by streaks of dust blown across the Martian surface by heavy
winds. Several scientists had proposed a similar theory in the early 1900s, but it was only
proven correct in the 1960s when the first unmanned spacecraft made flybys over Mars and
took pictures of its surface.

5. Luminiferous Aether: The aether, also known as the ether, was a mysterious
substance that was long believed to be the means through which light was
transmitted through the universe. Philosophers as far back as the Greeks had
believed that light required a delivery system, a means through which it became
visible, and this idea managed to persist all the way through to the nineteenth
century. If correct, the theory would have redefined our entire understanding
of physics. Most notably, if the aether were a physical substance that could exist even in a
vacuum, then even deep space could be more easily measured and quantified. Experiments
often contradicted the theory of the aether, but by the 1700s it had become so widespread
that its existence was assumed to be a given. Later, when the idea was abandoned, physicist
Albert Michelson referred to luminiferous aether as one of the grandest generalizations in
modern science. How it was Proven Wrong: In traditional scientific fashion, the notion of a
luminiferous aether was only gradually phased out as more sophisticated theories came into
play. Experiments in the diffraction and refraction of light had long rendered traditional
models of the aether outdated, but it was only when Einsteins special theory of relativity
came along and completely reconfigured physics that the idea lost the last of its major
adherents. The theory still exists in various forms, though, and many have argued that
modern scientists simply use terms like fields and fabric in place of the more taboo term
aether.

4. The Blank State Theory: One of the oldest and most controversial theories in psychology
and philosophy is the theory of the blank slate, or tabula rasa, which
argues that people are born with no built-in personality traits or
proclivities. Proponents of the theory, which began with the work of
Aristotle and was expressed by everyone from St. Thomas Aquinas
to the empiricist philosopher John Locke, insisted that all mental content was the result of
experience and education. For these thinkers, nothing was instinct or the result of nature. The
idea found its most famous expression in psychology in the ideas of Sigmund Freud, whose
theories of the unconscious stressed that the elemental aspects of an individuals personality
were constructed by their earliest childhood experiences. How it was Proven Wrong: While
theres little doubt that a persons experiences and learned behaviors have a huge impact on
their disposition, it is also now widely accepted that genes and other family traits inherited
from birth, along with certain innate instincts, also play a crucial role. This was only proven
after years of study that covered the ways in which similar gestures like smiling and certain
features of language could be found throughout the world in radically different cultures.
Meanwhile, studies of adopted children and twins raised in separate families have come to
similar conclusions about the ways certain traits can exist from birth.

3. Phrenology: Although it is now regarded as nothing more than a

pseudoscience, in its day phrenology was one of the most popular and well-
studied branches of neuroscience. In short, proponents of phrenology believed
that individual character traits, whether intelligence, aggression, or an ear for
music, could all be localized to very specific parts of the brain. According to
phrenologists, the larger each one of these parts of a persons brain was, the
more likely they were to behave in a certain way. With this in mind, practitioners would often
study the size and shape of subjects heads in order to determine what kind of personality
they might have. Detailed maps of the supposed 27 different areas of the brain were created,
and a person who had a particularly large bump on their skull in the area for, say, the sense
of colors, would be assumed to have a proclivity for painting. How it was Proven Wrong: Even
during the heyday of its popularity in the 1800s, phrenology was often derided by mainstream
scientists as a form of quackery. But their protests were largely ignored until the 1900s, when
modern scientific advances helped to show that personality traits could not be traced to
specific portions of the brain, at least in not as precise a way as the proponents of phrenology
often claimed. Phrenology still exists today as a fringe science, but its use in the 20th century
has become somewhat infamous: it has often been employed as a tool to promote racism,
most famously by the Nazis, as well by Belgian colonialists in Rwanda.
2. Einsteins Static Universe: Prior to scientists embracing the notion that the universe was
created as the result of the Big Bang, it was commonly believed that
the size of the universe was an unchanging constantit had always
been the size it was, and always would be. The idea stated that that
the total volume of the universe was effectively fixed, and that the
whole construct operated as a closed system. The theory found its
biggest adherent in Albert Einsteinthe Static Universe is often known as Einsteins
Universewho argued in favor of it and even calculated it into his theory of general
relativity. How it was Proven Wrong: The theory of a static universe was problematic from
the start. First of all, a finite universe could theoretically become so dense that it would
collapse into a giant black hole, a problem Einstein compensated for with his principle of the
cosmological constant. Still, the final nail in the coffin for the idea was Edwin Hubbles
discovery of the relationship between red shiftthe way the color of heavenly bodies change
as they move away from usand distance, which showed that the universe was indeed
expanding. Einstein would subsequently abandon his model, and would later refer to it as the
biggest blunder of his career. Still, like all cosmological ideas, the expanding universe is just
a theory, and a small group of scientists today still subscribe to the old static model.

1. Fleischmann and Pons Cold Fusion: While the conditions required to

create nuclear energy usually require extreme temperaturesthink of the
processes that power the sunthe theory of cold fusion states that such a
reaction is possible at room temperature. Its a deceivingly simple concept,
but the implications are spectacular: if a nuclear reaction could occur at
room temperature, then an abundance of energy could be created without
the dangerous waste that results from nuclear power plants. This
groundbreaking theory briefly seemed to have become a reality in 1989, when the electro-
chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons published experimental results suggesting
that they had achieved cold fusionand the precious excess energy it was hoped to
producein an experiment where an electric current was run through seawater and a metal
called Palladium. The response to Pons and Fleischmanns claims by the media and the
scientific community was overwhelming. The experiments were hailed as a turning point in
science, and it was briefly believed that with cold fusion energy would be cheap, clean, and
abundant. How it was Proven Wrong: The fervor over cold fusion died down as soon as other
scientists tried to replicate the experiment. Most failed to get any kind of similar results, and
after their paper was closely studied, Fleischmann and Pons were accused not only of sloppy,
unethical science, but were even said to have stretched the truth of their results. For years
after, the idea of cold fusion became synonymous with fringe science. Still, despite the stigma
attached to it, many have argued that there was never anything necessarily wrong about cold
fusion as a theory. In recent years, scientists have once again started to experiment with new
ways of achieving a so-called tabletop nuclear reaction, with some even claiming to have
achieved surprising success.